19th century american imperialism essay

Get Full Essay Get access to this section to get all help you need with your essay and educational issues. Get Access Imperialism in the United States Essay Sample During the end of the 19th century to early 20th century there were numerous reasons for the United State to turn into an Imperialistic country. For example, there was lot and lots of economic, political, and strategic things that were happening throughout America and the rest of the world during this time period. Various industries such as investors including bankers and the new wealthy class were scared that the United States would soon produce more than it could ever use up and wanted to find new source of raw materials and markets for their products in new states.

So we made a thoroughfare for Freedom and her train, Sixty miles in latitude, three hundred to the main; Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain, While we were marching through Georgia. We bring the jubilee!

The Flag that makes you free! One of the most conspicuous of morally charged terms of political condemnation, and certainly the most explosive in its dimension for political passion and even civil violence, is "racism. This case against racism seems so strong that its form gets borrowed to characterize parallel conceptions of moral and political evils like "sexism," "classism," and "homophobia.

If racism at root is just the belief that some races or groups of humans are genetically and intrinsically less able i. If the moral law is that we must allow the free exercise of the innocent, competent will of others in regard to their own interests, then it is perfectly possible that someone with racist beliefs might actually follow this rule and even have the best of intentions.

We might even say that at one time, if not even now, that kind of thing was rather common: They thought of Africans as the practical and moral equivalent of children -- which actually added to their outrage and their anguish since mistreating children the incompetent is more morally culpable than mistreating competent adults.

We cannot hold the Abolitionists morally liable for not holding the "right beliefs" about race, unless we believe that such right beliefs are so obvious that only a kind of intellectual negligence could be the cause of their believing them.

Looking at the received knowledge of the age, however, it would be surprising if they believed anything else.

As Stephen Jay Gould saysabout the ridicule often heaped upon Bishop James Ussher for his determination from Biblical chronology that the world was created in BC, "The proper criterion must be worthiness by honorable standards of one's own time Models of inevitable progress, whether for the parorama of life or the history of ideas, are the enemy of sympathetic understanding, for they excoriate the past merely for being old and therefore primitive and benighted " [Stephen Jay Gould, "Fall in the House of Ussher," Eight Little Piggies, Reflections in Natural Hisory, W.

We don't have to be too "sympathetic" with ideas that we now associate with terror and genocide, [ 2 ] but self-righteousness today is not a virtue in relation to a period when many things seemed different.

Hume's views are a good indication of the opinion of the age among informed men. In a essay, "Of National Characters," he says: I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation.

No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the Whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular.

Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession.

If we expect Hume to have known better, we must ask what information he can have had. We cannot just say that he should have assumed, as a moral axiom, that everyone is the same.

There is no reason why Hume, or anyone else, should ever make such assumptions. That is not a question of morals, but of facts. And if we think differently, it should be because we are better informed.

In contrast to Hume, however, we may consider Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was very concerned with this issue, since he advocated the emancipation of black slaves. In the end Jefferson by no means disagreed with Hume, but he seems far less certain about it.

He carefully considers all the evidence known to him in his Notes on Virginia and, after arguing that there is no evidence of the moral inferiority of blacks rather different from more recent racismthen concludes: The opinion that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence.

To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the anatomical knife, to optical glasses, or analysis by fire or by solvents.Racism. Every individual on earth has his completing causes; consequently an individual with perfect causes becomes perfect, and another with imperfect causes remains imperfect, as the negro who is able to receive nothing more than the human shape and speech in its least developed form.

- Imperialism By the late 19th and early 20th century, Europe was expanding its borders. In an attempt to grow its economy and culture, Europe’s superpowers began to search for new soil. Africa was an easy target; it wasn’t politically secure and it wasn’t modernized.

Free Essay: The New Imperialism during the 19th century throughout Africa and Asia was an influential prompt to the rise of colonialism and powerful European. Another reason why the Americans established imperialism in the 19th century is the fact that the American West was closing, and therefore there was a need for opening of new markets.

The American imperialism is said to operate on the perspective that stronger nations are there to take colony of weaker nations. 19th Century America. Updated July 30, JUMP TO.. Primary Documents - Timelines - Maps, - From Jefferson to the coming of the Civil War, Manifest Destiny & the Wild West, Industrial Revolution, Women's Rights, Inventions & Railroad History, The Gilded Age, Spanish-American War & Imperialism, The Progressive Era - Populism, Various Misc.

Topics. Apr 16,  · American Imperialism in the 19th Century term paper In the late nineteenth century, the American Imperialism movement began.

Imperialism is the "acquisition of control over the government and the economy of another nation, usually by conquest." (Davidson, Delay, Heyrman, Lytle & Stoff, , p.